


Rumpus, Hubbub, Hullaballoo

by Vehemently



Category: Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-23
Updated: 2007-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We are the creatures that know and know too much."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rumpus, Hubbub, Hullaballoo

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Minnow for a readthrough.
> 
> Written for shrift

 

 

**39**

It has been a lifetime and still Will invites him over, when the wife is busy, and the children rolling on the floor. They are thundrous, three strapping giggling girls, all tow-headed like their father. Will sits on the couch and stares at them in wonder, smiling, foolish. They pull on his feet, untie his shoes, stick their stubby fingers in his ears and up his nose, pull on his lips. The oldest disdains these games; she's twelve, and sits on the couch in imitation of the adults. Her sisters settle in, after a while, on Jim's lap, and ask for stories.

Will has run to pudge a bit about the middle but Jim is still whip-thin, dark hair shot through with early gray the way Irish often go. It has been a lifetime and still Will invites him over and they sit side by side on the couch and don't have to say anything to each other.

**14**

The wind blows colder, too cold for kites, and Jim and Will are back in school. Something has changed, now, something in themselves or in the world, they're never sure, but suddenly it's November and they're reading the newspapers. They can tell who at school has had enough to eat, and who hasn't. 

Jim tries to give his lunch away to Clarence Fossett, and gets a punch in the nose instead. "I don't need _your_ charity either," shouts Clarence, and stalks out of the schoolyard. Jim nurses his bloody nostril with a handkerchief, that his mother will wash out in the evening, and exclaim over how bad boys give their mother palpitations; and when Jim is sent inside to clean up he discovers that Will's got a black eye.

"Oh," says Jim, just as Will is saying, "Oh."

Their teacher looks them both over, clucking her tongue. Will's eye is puffy, purpling impressively. His blond eyelashes, always invisible against his pale skin, stand out like reverse shadows atop the bruise.

"Boys," says their teacher, Mr. Collier's cousin down from Milwaukee. "Boys, that's not how you go about it." She wears men's shirts, that she obviously must get from her cousin's haberdashery, the cuffs neatly mended each time they fray. Her pursed lips are brilliantly red, her one indulgence in the drab classroom.

"But his little sister gets two boiled eggs in her lunch, every day," Will protests. "I saw her --" 

Jim grabs him, brains leaping ahead to the obvious conclusion. Miss Collier eyes him, and then eyes Will, and a sorrowful dawn pinks over Will's face.

"It's not fair," Jim strangles out. 

"People shouldn't go hungry," Will adds. "It's not right." He wrests his arm free from Jim's grip and they stand trembling side by side. Jim can't look at him, in case he's on the edge of tears.

Miss Collier leans on her desk, arms crossed. She's got a hard eye, a city eye Mr. Halloway calls it, and she gives it to both boys. "Probably his ma doesn't know he's doing it," she says at last. "It's better if I'm the one rats him out."

Will stuffs his hands into his pockets, as if that's it, as if that's all they can do, as if they'll both go home to their houses, where they've got their own _rooms_ , for crying out loud, and play with the new toys from their oh-so-recent birthdays, and not think any more about scrawny Clarence Fossett and his plump little sister. Jim's mouth is open to protest when Will pops his right hand out of his pocket after all, brandishing the stub of a pencil like a conductor for a brass band.

"Do you think," Will asks, and then hesitates. Jim shuffles up close, so he's there, and Will can go on, "Do you think we could write to Mrs. Roosevelt? My mother and dad told me about all the things she's helped people out with when they're in a rough spot. Don't you think she'd help?"

"She gets an awful lot of letters," Miss Collier warns. "And there are an awful lot of boys without any supper in this country."

Jim is flushed, red, desperate: "But --"

But the rest of the class is shuffling inside, dusty, cutting off their outside shouts instantly as they notice the tableau. They must know Clarence has run off, and know it was him bloodied Jim's nose, but they stand there blank, heedless. Miss Collier stands up and claps her hands for attention, calling out orders for what they're all to do now recess is over. 

Will reaches out, slow, and takes Jim by the shoulder. "Come on, Jim Nightshade," he mumbles, so only they two can hear it. "We'll think of something." He turns Jim, leads him back to a desk in the rear of the room, and the other kids have to crane their necks to look. Miss Collier claps her hands again, and the staring faces turn away. Jim puts his forearm over his eyes, and doesn't hear a word of their afternoon lesson.

**20**

Jim flunked the physical and gets no chance to kill Nazis. He cools his heels in an office instead, waiting on space in the new War Department building they're building across the river in Virginia. He totes up columns in ledgers and gets to work the telephone, calling up suppliers and bothering them about their quotas. He flirts with the operators, smooth lovely voices like dream-women in his ear, and they promise not to disconnect him if a damn or a hell slips out every once in a while. Sometimes on a good day he gets to go to warehouses in Maryland and wander through the massive flats of _things_ , just _things_ up to the sky, giant cans of tomatoes and sacks of flour and boxes of sheet steel and old rusty guns from some other war long ago.

Will passed the physical, and is training to be infantry. Jim thinks he should be an honor guard, an actor in a newsreel about the Army, all tall and blocky and blond like heartwood. Jim thinks he should get to raise and lower flags, or salute Captains as they board their ships, or guard national monuments, and Will thinks Jim is being ridiculous. Jim writes letters to Will every week. _It's just a goddamn murmur_ , he writes. _Just a goddamn murmur. My heart's good enough for anybody to shoot at._ Will is still in Alabama, learning how to march, when Jim is writing that.

The nation's capital is a boomtown, harebrained, eager, a sprawling imagination of tomorrowland. Jim meets Corporals who have been in the Army twelve years, and Majors who have been in the Army twelve days. They even let women into the services, smart clacking heels down the long corridors and smart mouths fending off the ardent amours of starry-eyed junior adjutants. Jim keeps his buttons polished smartish, and keeps up on the black-market scuttlebutt, and keeps discovering new people from new places he's never heard of.

In the cafeteria, over cigarettes and forgotten coffee cups, Jim debates the island-strategy of the Pacific war with some sharp dark fellow from California (he's in munitions, Jim is pretty sure) who protests that the coast still isn't safe. Strangers leap in for a comment, and head out again to finish their egg-cups before their afternoon meetings. Jim hunches forward, knee-to-knee with the Californian, both their gestures expansive as if they were across the room from one another instead of across the table. They step on each other's feet and knock over each other's water glasses and plan the invasion of mainland China, using cutlery to form lines of advance on the formica. They argue into the evening, fewer and fewer strangers at the nearby tables, till finally the cafeteria pulls its night curtains and throws them out and Jim and the Californian stand there on a street corner blowing on their hands in the spring chill. Jim looks the fellow over and the fellow looks him over and they hurry down the street, side by side each with his hands in his own pockets. The Californian leads him up the stairs of a boarding house and into a tiny, drab room and pushes Jim down on the bed, breathless.

The fellow doesn't know where to put his hands and he has never tried to unbutton any man's shirt but his own. "Let me," says Jim, and teaches him how.

Jim doesn't write to Will about that.

Will writes back, when he can, which isn't often. Their letters cross each other as often as not. Will writes about the startling foliage of Alabama, lush and weird, and the whisper-thin cotton of day-dresses washed too many times. He writes about the strange city boys with their accents and the strange country boys with their too-careful manners. He writes about the first time he meets a Negro and shakes his hand, about how his Sergeant tells him not to be too friendly. Jim eats up those letters like a starving man, like a man who doesn't know that there's a war on.

**26**

Jim stands with Will's bride Sarah, her sturdy hips and her hair artlessly curled. They'll be married in a week, which is time enough for horseshoes in the back yard. Will's parents watch from the porch, weird fragile expressions on their faces as Will moves around this tall capable girl from away, from _Oregon_ for heaven's sake. Jim is convinced they expected her to show up in a bonnet, riding a Conestoga wagon, but instead she just got off the bus from Chicago, like anybody else. She and Will were too polite even to kiss in the town square, as if anybody who looked at them couldn't tell.

Will's clang of iron, and the horseshoe shimmies around and around before it slides to the ground. Sarah puts her hands in the air, Victory, and gives a bold shout. Jim watches sidewise as Will's parents break out in shy smiles.

"That's for luck," Will says, and snakes an arm around Sarah's waist. 

She pecks him on the cheek. "Go fetch me that one and we'll nail it up above the door to our bedroom."

Jim doesn't know how they met, just that it was in the war, somewhere. There's a story in there: the intrepid nurse, the wounded hero, and a story can edit out the two boring years between their first meeting and the day that Will finally sent off the letter asking her to come to Green Town and be married. (Jim helped him write it, and made Will take out all of the mawkish poetry, so really, he feels he deserves some credit for the match.) It's a nice story, exciting, with action and romance, just the thing for the _Saturday Evening Post_. Jim could write that story, easy as you please. But he hasn't yet and he doesn't think he's going to.

"You've known each other all your lives," says Sarah, half as a question. She's wearing dungarees turned up to the knee and a short sleeved shirt, as if the war were still on, as if she doesn't know women aren't needed in factories any more. She tucks her dark gold hair behind one ear and watches Jim's face for an answer. He's not sure of the question.

"He's a day older, so for me that's literally true," he says with a shrug. And then, blurting, pale: "He's the nice one."

Her eyes are hazel, a dark mottled color like camouflage. She is freckled, apple-cheeked, perfect. "Are you the not-nice one?" she asks, and as suddenly as the sky clouds over they are both serious, frowning a little, Will still bright as he collects his sun-warmed iron trophy. Jim can't bear it and looks away first.

"Didn't he tell you? I'm a struggling novelist. We're not a nice bunch."

Sarah is immune to his sarcasm. "What kinds of stories do you write? Mystery stories? Adventures? Drama?"

"Yes," says Jim, and plasters a salesman's empty grin on his face. "Those too."

She looks at him sidewise, half-smirking. "You're a queer fellow," she tells him.

"That's me," says Jim. "Like a wooden nickel."

She is startled into laughter, a high rich range of laughter like the churchbells at an armistice. Will ambles over, smiling, head cocked to one side. "What craziness is he putting in your head?" he asks his bride, but all she can do is wave one hand and laugh, and after a moment Will is laughing with her, no idea why, just because she's laughing.

**18**

There's government money for able young men, and Jim has no affection for school, so he hitchhikes out of town to try his luck in Chicago. He leaves his mother a letter explaining things, and ends it with, "If you need anything, ask Will. He'll help."

They've talked it over a hundred times, Jim with increasing irritation and Will forceful, using his size, looming over Jim like a giant boulder over its skinny dark shadow. Will is at the teacher's college, and working besides, and making enough to cover his tuition, but not enough to feed himself. He'll have a degree in two years, and he's happy to depend on his parents. Will can imagine himself as a teacher, and Jim can't, and Will can imagine himself in Green Town, and Jim can't, and that's the end of it as far as Jim is concerned. Will can't say why the idea of Jim in Chicago scares him so badly.

The city is a madhouse, teeming, alive, like a colony of discontented bees. There are Negroes and Greeks, Lithuanians and Jews, even Chinamen in the street and on the trains and standing in line at the government offices. Jim is too proud to stare. There are boardinghouses with young men five or six to a room, some of them without even a suitcase. There are palatial houses, blocks and blocks of them, with gleaming black cars waiting in the street.

In that swirl of vigorous discontent, Jim learns a few things about the world. He finds work ushering in a theatre, wide smile before the house opens and a broom and a mop after. It's not steady work, as the companies come in and go out again to tour the little prairie towns, but it's an in for Jim and he hangs out at the federal offices on the chance they might need him to work or introduce him to chorus girls. He keeps body and soul together, and it turns out a lot of the women filing and typing at the federal offices _are_ chorus girls, only they don't look nearly as glamorous in long woollen skirts.

Jim can dance, and that gets him invited to parties. Jim has actually read Machiavelli and Rousseau (thanks, Mr. Halloway), and that gets him invited to more parties. The dancing parties are wild, full of liquor and bare white legs, and end up amazingly often in somebody or other's arms; the talking parties involve a lot of cigarettes and long-nursed whiskies and stabbing gestures across tables and sarcastic remarks about capitalism and things Jim has never really had to think about. He doesn't actually understand what Russia is all about, just that it's outlawed and full of intrigue and involves labor unions. Jim is all for labor unions, especially if he can join one and start making enough dough to keep his own room. Screwing in a supply closet loses its illicit appeal, after the third or fourth time.

The uppers let him attend all the parties he can stand, and still get to work most of the time. Jim drinks the dregs of opening night Champagne bottles, and argues till dawn over what to do about the fall of Spain. He ferrets out the jazz clubs and the playwrights and intellectuals who slouch there in the back, nodding at the Negro musicians on stage and explaining about _true_ folk culture, art in its rawest form. He swipes a rose or two from the big bouquets sent by millionaire arts patrons, and presents them to one chorus girl or another. He writes irate letters to the editor on the office typewriter, and doesn't care that none of them get printed. There's always a borrowed sandwich in one pocket, and a spare nickel in the other. He hardly thinks about Will at all.

Roaringly, staggeringly drunk, Jim lets his hands wander sometimes, _Sorry, sorry_. There is enough elbow-in-ribs, whole hosts of airy cheek-kisses and arm-in-arm union rabblerousers, a city of hungry tactile knowledge. Jim watches fistfights in alleys and doesn't even remember who is fighting, or why, just that it's thrilling and he must be there. He knocks shoulders with young fellows by his side, stagehands and technicians and understudies of understudies. All of them blooming with youth, gorgeous, peaches plucked from the small towns of Illinois or Ohio at the very moment of their ripeness, just like Jim. They eye each other, shy at first, but this is the city and they can try anything once.

Jim discovers the things he can try: electric, kinetic, forbidden. He debates whether radio can be the model of mass culture and squirms with the secret knowledge that his socialist friends would call him a degenerate. He downs his whiskies quickly and asks impertinent questions about the rumors of famine in White Russia. It's easy to engineer grudge-match arguments: the pact with Germany, two empires dividing up Poland like it's a sandwich to be cut in two, the fate of Trotsky. Somebody wants to know what Zionism's got to do with it all, and somebody else keeps bringing up the atrocities in China.

The bad news gets worse and they all drink too much, sentimentally or angrily or with black certainty of doom. Jim types half of a letter explaining why the human race should be wiped out and forced to start over, but he burns the page before he finishes it. He's got work now, as much work as he wants, composing ad copy for the theatres and assembling the playbills, but the uppers have him shaky and the whisky has him more shaky and he spends long days sleeping in his rented room with the shades down so that he can go out at night and argue and drink and screw.

When he finally calls home, he has to call Will. The Nightshade house doesn't have a telephone line, and anyway, he can't speak to his mother like this. "Are you drunk?" Will asks, and Jim is too drunk to deny it.

"The things they've got here," Jim slurs to him. "It's like a carnival every day."

Will is in his house, with his parents downstairs, his books in neat rows on shelves they built out of scrap wood. He is in his house, where he belongs, maybe still in his shirtsleeves after a day of studying, or maybe already in his pajamas and drinking a last glass of milk. He can walk down the street and never see someone he doesn't know, and never hide from them something they don't know. "Come home, Jim Nightshade," says Will softly.

Jim tells him, "I'll try," and means it.

**22**

Guadalcanal was a gripping drama, of course, related on the radio every day in breathless summary. Jim couldn't follow the Tunisia campaign at all, though, not without a map right in front of him as he listened. Tunisia had never seemed like an important country to know about, till war came there. Now the pushpins have leapt the Mediterranean, hopeful blue marks in Sicily, at Salerno, at Anzio and Nettuno. They've paused there, stuck in late winter and one damn thing after another the Krauts keep pulling off. The radio is so hopeful, but Jim knows how to read a map.

Will is never specific, in his letters. Jim knows he passed through Salerno at some point, because the boats in the harbor reminded him of sailing paper boats in a creek when they were young. He's been vague since then, just snow and mountains and slushy mud, vague enough that Jim doesn't know whether anybody even lives in that part of Italy, or if it's all just mountains and enemies. The post is slow; sometimes it's weeks between letters, and then Jim gets three at once. The only solution is to bombard Italy with so much mail for Private Will Halloway that he can read them and read them and never finish reading till the war is over.

Jim writes about the women in the service, who work down the hall and chuck him on the chin now and then. One or two of them will take a leer, on an idle day, and he inflates his success into wild racy adventures of office necking and near-discovery. He gets a hand on Linda Marchman's thigh one time, practically by accident, just helping her with her stack of files, and it's an epic of imagined nudity in a letter to Will. Linda's face is nothing to write home about, but he writes Will about it, straightening her cast eye and softening her brow till Jim's practically in love with her himself. 

He writes the river's retreating ice, and the first crocus, and ridicule for the white trousers the Navy men wear around the town. He writes the idyll of their childhood, cold frogs and intrepid clawing kittens and the names of girls whose ponytails they used to pull. He writes the boredom of handling paperwork into a fantasy of dissecting, analyzing, destroying the enemy before the first shot is fired. Jim writes a victory parade, two of them, ten, and the chorus girls who will line up along the parade route and show their legs in gratitude.

Will's handwriting has deteriorated these past few months, bigger and blockier as if the cold were getting into his hands. He writes over and over that everything's fine, that the chow is good and hot, that they'll make it through and chase those Krauts back to where they came from, you'll see. He writes the same words in every letter, and they only look different because the line breaks are in different places.

Their letters cross paths in the mail.

Jim stays late in the office, typing furiously. He writes to Will about buried treasure, and cowboys, and the shocking idea of blasting in a rocket out into space to visit the moon. He writes about hero dogs rescuing babies from drowning, about navigating a ship around Cape Horn, about motorcycle races, about the dandelions that will nod in Green Town come summer. Jim sprains his fingers imagining the world onto paper for Will, in case Will might be forgetting it.

**36**

Old Charles Halloway's funeral is the best-attended event Jim has ever seen in Green Town. Everybody he knows, and a lot of people he doesn't know, but Will is in the first row, next to his mother, tow-head and black suit. Beside him, Sarah his wife, and the three little girls. The youngest, a toddler, climbs the pew and grabs onto the wooden back, and grins and chuckles at Jim all through the funeral.

Jim sits with his mother, arm around her as she sobs. She can't say why she's taking it so hard, harder on the outside anyway than the widow, but she blows her nose awkwardly during the silences. Will gives the eulogy, polite and honorable, but the important things he saves for later.

The parlor of old is just a living room now, the davenport long gone in favor of furniture the children can't destroy. Will's parents moved into the back room downstairs, and that's where old Charles Halloway died: in the house he'd been born into, in the house where his grandchildren live upstairs. When the speeches and the graveside ceremony are done, the people who knew him settle in the living room and pick over the neighbors' casseroles.

Miss Watriss and the former Miss Wills (now Mrs. Collier) only linger a few minutes, to tell Will about the memorial they'd like to do at the library. Jim settles in, his mother banished to bed with a cold compress, and stares at the old chair from the back room that they've brought up for visitors to sit in. It's a sturdy thing, carved oak with scrolls on the arms, that's been in the house since it was built. Mr. Halloway often sat in that chair, a wiggling boy on each knee, to read aloud on winter evenings.

Mrs. Halloway keeps her composure, and a discreet handkerchief in one of her fists. They stare at the empty chair where Mr. Halloway used to sit, old man with bony old knees and his white hair like goosedown. The girls are playing on the floor in their Sunday dresses, fannies in the air, imperturbable.

"He was thirty-nine when I was born," says Will, fretting at a loose thread in the couch. "He thought that was too old. Does that seem old to you?"

"Ask me again in three years," Jim cracks. But he remembers that story Will's father told once, about traveling the east, restless, wrestling with himself. Jim is almost the age at which Charles Halloway was bowled over by a woman and a family and a life, and he isn't near ready for children.

"I wondered to myself," breaks in Mrs. Halloway suddenly, as if someone's just turned up the volume on what she's been saying all day. "I wondered, how can I be marrying this man? He's nearly twice my age! He wondered it too."

"I don't care how old he was," says Sarah, brash. She takes her husband by the hand. "He was terrific."

"Wasn't he?" says the widow, a smile on her lips.

"He was a great man," says Jim, and repeats himself, nodding: "a great man."

"He was," says Will, and stoops to pick up the toddler.

**24**

Will is home first, so Jim never finds out whether they held a party for him. He thinks in his head that Will should have been met at the train station, like a whistle-stop campaign, only this is the last stop and all his supporters gathering on the platform to carry him on their shoulders down Main Street and throw streamers and shake his hand till it hurts. Jim gets off the train in November, hat cocked just so and duffel over his shoulder, like he's seen in the movies. His mother is waiting for him, saggy and gray till she sees him and she blooms suddenly, her only son come home safe.

Jim endures her talc-kisses and asks after Will. Oh, he's home, she says. Home two months now. I talk to his mother every morning. He's not ready to go back to teaching, yet. Maybe in the winter term.

It is frightening, to sit in his old bedroom and look across between the houses where they used to whisper and see into Will's bedroom. It is very neat, as if nobody lived there. Jim's been home in his old room for two hours, and it's a mess already.

It is frightening, to change out of the uniform one last time and into dungarees, boyish clothes, and go loiter on Will's front porch. Jim stuffs his hands in his pockets, and realizes that way he will never knock, and pulls his hands out of his pockets again.

Will's mother gives them lemonade, apologetically, as if she wished she had a man's drink for them. Will thanks her quietly and Jim thanks her brashly and she leaves them alone together, in the parlor. They drink their lemonade. Will's hands are steady on the glass.

Jim listens to them swallowing in tandem; he can hear the click as Will's throat closes over a gulp. Jim is quite sure there wasn't any lemonade on the Italian front, that winter. Jim can't remember whether he included lemonade in his letters.

Will has nothing to say. They are just sitting there in a nice parlor, wrinkling the upholstery on that nice davenport that's been in the house since before Will was born, and Mrs. Halloway has gone away, that they might share the secrets of men together. Jim sits awkwardly with the lemonade glass, till in exasperation he sets it on the floor. Will gives him an odd look, and scoops up Jim's glass and sets both glasses down on the side table.

Will's sleeves are unbuttoned, and the fabric pulls back as he stretches. It's the first glimpse Jim has gotten; of course he's got to stare, and Will endures it without comment. Jim lets his eyes linger, far longer than can possibly be polite, not that they have ever worried about polite between the two of them. Jim follows up his eyes with his hands, lifting Will's forearm and drawing back the sleeve and tracing with a forefinger the messy, pointless scribbles of scar tissue up and down his ropy tendons.

"Shrapnel," Will tells him, flat. "I had my hand on my helmet, so I didn't lose an eye."

That white forearm in his hand, Jim studies the rescued face and notes a tiny mark on the side of Will's chin, two more below his cheekbone, like raindrops on a glass only forever. There's a tiny notch taken out of his ear, near the top. His eye is huge under Jim's scrutiny, wide, blue-gray, whole and without blemish. There's nothing to be read there.

"Good," says Jim, because he can't think of the right word. "Good."

They sit side by side on the davenport. The clock in the hallway ticks gently, time's a-wasting, onward, onward. Jim doesn't know what he'll do, now the war's over. There's a chance he might go back to Chicago; that's where the money is. Will will stay here, and teach school, like he's always planned to do. If he ever has anything to say. Jim is strangling in the silence.

It's got to be done after all, and so it's without warning that Jim grabs suddenly at Will, threading his arm under Will's shoulder like a corpsman shoring up the walking wounded. He feels the startle in Will's ribs, and the way that Will relaxes a little, after he's let the startle go through him. Jim holds his breath and it is slow like time, like river water washing dinosaur bones out of solid rock, like watching wheat grow. Jim waits for the uprising and it does come, shy, just that big solid arm, blond hairs glinting in the late afternoon light. It's instinct, it's long-forgotten routine, it's sense-memory.

Will throws an arm over Jim's neck, like they're kids again, like they're wrestling or steadying each other in a stiff wind off the prairie. Jim feels that muscle, the _size_ of him, when did Will Halloway turn into a mountain? They hang off each other, Jim's skinny bones and Will a bulldozer, a tank, a Superfortress --

Jim has to force it, at first. He huffs out a bark and feels his ribs collide with Will's. His second try works better, sounds like a proper laugh, silver in the fading room. Will's head swivels on that bull neck and Jim stares into the gloaming and makes himself laugh, again, _again_ , till his stomach has the rhythm of it and his cheeks pull up, aching. Suck cool dry air over teeth and laugh it out again, hard, fast, no shortage here. Plenty to give away. 

Will wheezes out an echo.

Temple to temple, they shudder out their laughter, caught up in it now, and soon neither of them can speak for the torrent of hilarity jouncing in their shoulders. They hang on tight and gasp and hold it and blow it all out in a hopeless giggle and Jim cries, "You remember, you remember --?" but he can't say what they remember, only that they do, heads together like curious adventurers over a tadpole pond, hair dark chestnut and white-blond overlapping, intrepid explorers of what's funny.

They give it time and all their energy, and after a while it fades. Jim can feel Will's pulse as it slows, the cling of his hand on Jim's shoulder. Jim says nothing and they eddy down toward calm again and Will holds on tight. They sit side by side on the davenport, and stare into the gloaming.

"I didn't think it would be like that," says Will, at last.

Jim tells him: "I wish I'd been there with you."

"I'm glad you weren't," says the ghost of Will's voice. He lifts his head, sits up straight like a man does, drags his arm away. The room is cooling; Will's mother turns on the lights in the kitchen, humming to herself over a stewpot, a roast, something she thinks Will will like. Jim wonders if Will's been eating, since he's got home, or if most of his time has been spent sitting silent in the parlor. There are still tears of hilarity drying on his cheeks.

Jim's thumbs are long, double-jointed, made for magic tricks. Tidy, he swipes at those tears and Will's face is in his hands, rough at the end of the day, a little pink from their exertion but turning dull again already. His mouth is still, closed, as if there isn't anything more to say. Jim presses in close, obvious, blooming with sweat, and kisses him.

They share a gasp, hot mist of surprise. "I'm glad you came back," Jim tells Will's cheek, as it blushes under his lips. He says it again in Will's ear, boys' secrets, cross my heart and hope to die. He says it over Will's shoulder, as they crush each other and Will shudders away his horror in Jim's firm grip. Stick a needle in my eye.

Autumn breath, in the doorway. The click of a latch, a slow shuffle of feet on the aging rug. Charles Halloway in the doorway, old, _really_ old now, stooping as if grown too big for the world. He raises his slow eyes and there's Jim, sharp chin tucked over Will's shoulder, squashing that broad back under his stick-arms. The tremble runs through them both, reverberating, ripples on ripples on ripples. Will shudders again and Jim hangs on, ant on an elephant's ear. He nods to the old man, and says nothing.

Charles Halloway turns away toward the kitchen, smiling, smiling, and tells his wife there's no hurry on dinner.

**33**

Jim stays up late at night, typing furiously. He has drunk too much, and _too much_ is a target moving too fast ever to quite catch up with. The stories fly out of him and onto the paper, funny stories and scary stories and stories of optimistic science adventure. There is enough material that he and his mother don't starve. He goes away to Chicago to meet with his agent, five or six times a year, and inevitably it ends up a long bender and Jim staggering home on a bus at odd hours of a weekday morning. He counts himself lucky he's never woken up married or in prison, and counts himself careful that he's never been so bad he's needed Will to come get him. The citizens of Green Town shake their heads at him, or anyway Jim thinks they do, but the library subscribes to _Ellery Queen_ and _Astounding_ and _Boys' Adventure_ because of him. He doesn't even have to ask; Miss Watriss surprises him one day with an issue that shows his name on page 3.

There is plenty of material. There's enough material to last him till his fingers fall off. Will teases him, reads it out loud off of the pulpy printed pages, lugubrious voices to entertain his wife after the children are in bed. Jim sits in the corner of the living room and cringes a little. Will's voice is low, not full like an orator's but slim and gentle and unassuming. To see Will arch his back and put on the hero's mantle, flimsy pulpy pages in hand, is a delight so grave to Jim that he cannot speak it, and turns his face away.

There's a society of writers that wants him to come to New York, give him a prize and let him give a speech. Will says he should go, but he thinks he won't. There are offers every now and then from Hollywood, movie producers and people who make television, that want him to come to California and meet blonde goddesses and invent wit for inarticulate movie stars. His agent says he should go, but he knows he won't.

Jim stays up late at night, typing furiously, the opposite window in the Halloway house covered in pink curtains now that Will's old room is where the children sleep. He keeps his window shut during the summer, stifling and sweating and the pages gone gummy under his fingertips, so as not to wake the girls from their slumber.

**39**

A panic seizes Jim and he trots outside to stare up at the roof of his house suddenly, on a night in early May. The old iron is still there, back in its place of honor where it's been for twenty-odd years: the lightning rod, the channeler, the thing that takes the strike and sends it groundward, around the house instead of through it: safe. It points toward the sky full of stars, and says nothing. Jim is knocking on Will's door.

After a little while, the inside door falls open and Will stands at the screen door, his glasses a little askew. His hair is messy around his head, cornsilk thinning a little now he's nearly forty. He's in a bathrobe and his bare feet on the floorboards. Jim flaps his arms against himself, still in shirtsleeves, and asks if he can come in.

They sit down on the couch and Will asks him if he'd like something to drink: milk, water, lemonade. Jim says no. They keep on sitting. Will has that quiet in him, like his father. He sits very still and Jim breaks out fidgeting and finally Will asks,

"What is it, Jim Nightshade?"

Jim leans forward, elbows on knees. He considers what to say for a long while. "It's a story I have to tell."

"You're good at stories," Will says.

"I guess I wanted to know if you'd let me tell this one."

The crinkles around Will's eyes bunch, and he smiles. "Am I in it?"

"Yes, you," says Jim.

"And you're in it?" Will asks.

"Yes," says Jim. "Me."

"Well all right then," says Will, as if that were that. 

"There are things," Jim remonstrates, slow. He doesn't dare look around. "It might be shocking."

But all Will does is let out a little chuckle. He stands up and Jim raises his head, agape, and Will pauses in the doorway as if surprised Jim isn't following. "You can start now, if you like. I have fifth graders in the morning. I have to sleep."

"Right," says Jim. "Sorry." He comes to his feet and slips past Will who holds open the front door. Jim paces the ten steps between their doors and puts his hand on his own doorknob and looks up. Will is still there, standing on his front porch in the lively night of May, waiting to see Jim safely in his own front door.

Their screen doors clack shut in unison. Jim races up the stairs cat-foot and is at the typewriter so quick he almost falls out of the chair. He types furiously late into the night, full of story, and in all of the town his is the only lit window.

 


End file.
